Preparenting: you are not your parents.
A gentle reminder of where we come from and what love is.
Reparenting allows you to unlearn or learn for the first time things your parents did or did not teach you and hold space for the healing of your inner child. The very fact that we can reparent ourselves proves that our learning and our being is not ultimately and fully determined by who our parents are and what they taught us. Who we are and who we become is not limited to the criteria belonging to the humans who brought us into the physical world. What sets us up to be like our parents or entirely different might boil down to the attachment developed as early as throughout our mother’s pregnancy and from the birth of our physical body.
If your parents love in a way that hurt you, if their definition of love is different than your own, and if their standard for themselves as parents is different than yours, you will not be the result of their equation. I was often dismissed when I said that I didn’t feel like my parents loved me. “Every parent loves their child,” I’ve been told. I’ve come to learn that it is not that they didn’t love me, but they did not love me the way I receive love and give love. We love differently, like we speak a different languages. The way I love my daughter today is incomparable to the way I was loved by my mother. I realized while she was in my womb that the love I had for this soul was unlike love I have ever received or felt. During my pregnancy, one of the hardest things I went through emotionally was the immense love I developed for an unborn child sending me into deep revisitation of things that were done to me by my own mother. Looking at the way I was mothered and thinking “I could never do this to my child,” was both heartbreaking and healing. I felt deep in my soul I was going to be a good mom, but also broke down often at the thought of what my mother was able to do to her babies as a form of punishment, discipline or simply as a result of not knowing how to love. The fear I once carried that I’d repeat the same mistakes my parents made turned into hope for something new during the preparenting phase of my life. I had to define what love really looked like and felt like from me. How do I give love? I had to define what love looked like and felt like for me. How do I receive love? And had to separate it from what I learned by what was done to me. What was I taught about love?
I learned in early childhood that love could not coexist with rejection, with saying ‘no’ or with boundaries. I was taught that loving others deeply meant loving yourself less. I was taught that the only way to express love was through money and giving gifts. I was taught that I would be loved more the less of me there was. I was taught that love was not as strong as anger. I was taught that love was less powerful than shame. I was taught that love was accentuated by alcohol. I was taught that sex was an act of service that came with romantic love; there was no love without sex but there could be sex without love. I was taught that giving your love also meant giving up your body. I was taught that love erases your identity. I was taught that love is conditional and can be taken away. I was taught that there is no love like a mother’s love, and also no harm like a mother’s harm: love and pain come together. The more you suffer, the more you are loved. The more you are willing to suffer, the more you love. The more you can endure, the stronger you are showing your commitment to that love. The less you question, the more you trust that love. None of this applies to the love I give and receive today. When I could clearly separate what I learned from what I believed and felt in my soul, I could see the contrast. I realized that strangers have loved me better than my own parents did at some moments. I realized that people I thought I loved I actually didn’t. I understood that my parents knew how to love each other, but that’s not how I love. I could finally explain what I meant: it’s not that my parents did not love me, they simply did not know how to love me.
The standard at which I hold myself in the role of a mother is different than the one of my own mother, and mothers before her. I have decided and committed, with the help of my inner fire and moral compass, to parent from my own definition of love and in a way that aligns with my core values and my soul. I want to learn how my daughter receives love and speak her language rather than assume she speaks my own. I love differently today. I love better. I am loved properly for my being. Love just is. It’s resilient. It’s not hard. It does not inflict pain. It’s not abusive. It’s not conditional. It can be a choice. It can be a given. And I am responsible for how I give love, receive love and what I teach about love. What I model and show my daughter about love is what she will seek out in the world. I recognize what I sought out for a long time was not my definition of love. Love that is not for me or from me. For a large portion of my life, I believed love equaled pain. Love equaled self sacrifice and abandonment to the point of losing oneself completely and dissipating into other people. But that was not love, and I always felt it deep down, the same way I always knew that I was not a bad child despite what I told. I always had that inner fire that reminded me there was more out there, something different, something kinder, something true; a love that did not result in constant pain. I always had a compass within pointing me in a different direction than where I was told to go, and I always felt deep down that I was worthy of experiencing true love, big love — that we all are. How tragic that some people spend their entire lives loving people in a different language? How sad that some people still receive love in a way that does not feel like love for them deep down?
I searched to define that deep-down feeling for a long time. I learned that it was there all along, I just could not access it. I learned that we are not our upbringing. You are not your parents. Your soul comes from Source, whatever and whoever you believe They are. You do not get your capacity to love from your parents. You do not get your capacity to forgive, care and evolve from your parents’ teachings or modeling. That deep-down feeling is your truest you. It will always be louder than what you are taught until it aligns with your path. You get this internal fire, innately, at birth from Creation. And it will scream at you, send you signs, synchronicities and messages until you hear It, see It, and follow the path It has for you. It’s your human mission to heal, grow, feel and evolve in alignment with It. Our greatest superpower is our capacity to feel all the feelings, especially love. And that, we are not taught how to do. We know how to do. We carry with us from the moment we are born. I saw it when my daughter emerged from the water, was placed in my arms and opened her eyes for the first time. She already knew how to feel and give divine love. It can be damaged, altered, broken, manipulated and blurred from human life experience and other people’s inability to love us right. It’s fragile. And right now, my daughter’s innate capacity to love is mine to protect. It’s our truest ability, rooted in our soul, pure and strong from our first heartbeat in utero. We can ignore it our entire lives, or we can choose to listen to It. Regardless, It will be always be trying to get our attention. We can always count on It to lead us and guide us. No matter what we are taught or how much it gets damaged, if we learn to listen to It, we will always find It again.
If this feeling comes from birth, if our beings are meant to tap into it from birth and on, the type of birth we have and its experience can surely affect it. Traumatic births can set us off track. Unnecessary medical interventions can affect the mother and baby’s first experience. A dysfunctional childhood home can hinder our ability to trust that deep-down feeling and access our internal software. Parents who don’t listen to their own inner fire won’t show us how to do that for ourselves. Being left to cry in our crib until we stop expecting our parents to respond to our cries will break our beliefs around nurture and love from our first weeks of life. If we can stop damaging the birth experience by making it an emergency medical procedure from the start, rather than seeing it as a physiological ability and natural process, we can help protect that sacred bond and connection from our first breath. If we can stop damaging the postpartum experience by valuing training and interference over nature and instinct, we can create better outcomes and healthier postpartum experiences, which is favourable to the mother-child bond. If we can value mothers in society and in the workforce to give proper time to forge this bond, raise their family and live positive postnatal experiences, we can heal intergenerational trauma and create better family foundations. If we can honour babies’ birthright to start their lives in tune with the frequency of Creation and receiving unconditional love, close and connected to their mother in safe and healthy homes, we can change the world. I truly believe all healing starts at birth and in the postpartum home. If our life is a garden, birth sets the soil, and postpartum flowers bloom.
A difficult truth is, though they may not have always been the best choices, it was your parents’ choices that brought you here. And it is now your responsibility to lead from that or course correct. Your parent is fully responsible for what they did to you. They were not taken over by a bad spirit. They were not infected by some parasite. And it’s not hereditary. You are not infected with the same poison. The same monster won’t inevitably come out when you become a parent. When you accept that your parent did what they did because they chose to do so and were disconnected from their inner Source, you will understand that you also get to choose. What happened wasn’t your fault, but it is now your responsibility. It’s your job to decide what you carry on and what ends with you, to dive deep within and reconnect with your inner fire. To put it simply, our parents’ choices can make it harder for us to access our internal software of innate capabilities, but they did not create the software, it was already there.
This means our own children have this software too, and should not have to carry our choices and mistakes. They will get to choose what kind of person and parent they want to be and what type of relationship they keep with us in adulthood. Our choices and actions will reflect what kind of relationship we will have with them. We are not entitled to them. Our children are not a guarantee. They are not a product solely of us. They don’t belong to us. My daughter will love in her own way. She has her own inner fire. She will be led on her own path. The relationship I have with her will either grant me a spot on the sidelines to watch and cheer as she goes on, or will keep me out. Once our children no longer depend on us for basic needs, they get to choose what kind of relationship they want with us. How we show up for them during their dependant years will determine if they want us around in their adult life. If we can stop seeing children as little problems we have to fix right away, and rather see them as beings we are creating lifelong relationships and bonds with, we will always have a place in their life. If we take responsibility for our parenting, healing and make space for them, they will always make room for us. If we love them in their language, they will love us the same.
The vehicle gets us here, but love is already in us when we get here. Heal so you can access your internal wisdom fully and effortlessly, so you can constantly be in communication with your higher self and love from that divine place. Give your child that Higher love and you may just hold a place in their life long enough and close enough to witness their wonder while on their own journeys.